Kutuki: The Full Story

There are 200 million early learners in India. When we started in 2018, almost none of them had learning content that looked or sounded like their world. Every Indian child was getting the same English nursery rhymes, the same Western characters. India has thousands of songs and stories in dozens of languages — but nothing built from the ground up for a Kannada-speaking three-year-old in Bengaluru, or a Tamil-speaking five-year-old in Chennai.

No Indian Peppa Pig. No Indian Dora. Nothing that felt like it was made for these kids.

That was the question Kutuki started with.

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The beginning

Sneha Sundaram and I had been circling this problem for a while. We both came from creative backgrounds — music, film, education — and we kept seeing the same gap. Not just a market gap, but a cultural one. Indian kids deserved content that reflected the world they actually lived in.

We didn't start with a business plan. I wrote the first lines of code, we built a simple React Native app with just three content categories, and launched a beta in October 2018.

Then we waited.

People noticed fast

Parents started sending voice notes. Videos of their kids singing Kutuki songs at home. Teachers showed us recordings of children performing our content at school events. Kids were adopting the characters and stories into their daily lives — singing songs at dinner, asking for specific characters by name.

This wasn't just engagement. This was cultural adoption. The data backed it up too — strong repeat viewership, clear signals on which categories resonated most.

We stayed in beta for three months, collecting data from users across India. Consumption patterns informed our content strategy. Retention and engagement metrics guided UX decisions. By the time we came out of beta, we knew what we had.

NSRCEL and getting serious

We got incubated at NSRCEL, IIM Bangalore as part of the Women Startup Program. NSRCEL became our home for the next two years, right up until COVID hit. It gave us a base, a network, and credibility at a stage when we were still figuring things out.

In late 2018, we were also selected for Lightspeed's Extreme Entrepreneurs program — another signal that the idea had legs.

Raising the pre-seed

The pre-seed came together through conviction, not decks.

Vibhav Domkundwar at Better Capital and I had a single call. He was convinced by the end of it. Jerry Rao invested at the same stage — he believed the space needed disruption and backed that belief. Kushal Bhagia, then at First Cheque (now a partner at All In Capital), had actually attempted building in the same space earlier. He came on board with strong conviction from firsthand experience of how hard and how necessary the problem was.

That round gave us the impetus to go full-time and start building the content universe for real.

Building the team

The first full-time hire was a young animator deeply passionate about making a dent in early learning. We ran creative sprints modeled on product sprints — set constraints, give significant creative freedom. The team grew to include more animators, illustrators, and writers.

We hired our Head of Engineering through the NSRCEL network. But the most important hire we made was Gurupad Badithe as Head of Growth. Gurupad grew into far more than that title — he became an almost cofounder-level advisor, partner, and keeper of the flame for us. Every startup has one person who holds it together through the chaos. Gurupad was ours.

At peak, the team was 50+ people — engineers, animators, writers, illustrators, educators, and operations.

Content, not translations

This was the core bet. We didn't translate English content into Indian languages — we created original content for each language from scratch. A Kannada story referenced festivals, food, and contexts that a Kannada-speaking child would recognize. The characters were A/B tested across several experiments to find a baseline that would appeal to as many kids as possible.

Both Sneha and I come from creative backgrounds, and that shaped how we built Kutuki. We started with a pedagogical framework, then built stories that could be fleshed out into full-fledged animation. We developed a curriculum methodology specifically aimed at learning gaps uncovered through research for Indian kids — not adapting Western frameworks, but building from the ground up.

By the end, the library had roughly 1,500 original stories and books, plus about 500 learning games built on a custom Flutter game engine. All of it across 10 Indian languages: Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, English, Bengali, Gujarati, Malayalam, and Odia.

Supporting 10 languages with rewritten content — not translated — meant slower expansion but much higher quality per language. A Kannada-speaking child in Bengaluru got content that felt like it was made for them, because it was.

The product evolved

What started as a simple content app went through several distinct phases.

2018–2019: Content app. Three categories, animated stories and rhymes, React Native. Simple, focused.

2019–2020: Mini streaming platform. Expanded content categories significantly. Added curated learning paths. Improved recommendation and discovery based on engagement data. Started school partnerships.

2020: Live learning platform. COVID forced a revenue rethink. We didn't just bolt Zoom onto the app — we built an integrated video platform that used Kutuki's existing content and pedagogy within live sessions. Teachers could use our content smartly during live classes, blending synchronous teaching with our asynchronous library.

For thousands of kids, Kutuki became their first preschool experience. During lockdowns, that mattered.

2021 onwards: Games and foundational learning. Added about 500 learning games covering foundational language and numeracy. Built on a custom game engine in Flutter — we chose Flutter over Unity for rapid development since it had matured significantly by then. Better fit for an edtech game engine than a full 3D engine.

The tech behind it

The technical architecture evolved alongside the product.

At launch: React Native, Firebase, BigQuery for data, AWS CloudFront and Elemental Media for content delivery via HLS streaming. I wrote the first lines of code.

As we scaled: serverless with Cloud Functions and Postgres + Lambda. Then a move from React Native to native (Kotlin and Swift) when we needed better performance and Flutter wasn't mature enough yet. Node + Express backend. Firestore as a caching layer — it played exceptionally well with mobile, essentially serving as a fast read layer between the app and the core backend.

We deliberately ran a multi-cloud strategy: Google Cloud for real-time mobile features (Firebase, BigQuery, Cloud Functions), AWS for media infrastructure and compute (CloudFront, Elemental Media, Lambda). Each cloud used for its strengths.

Data infrastructure was set up from day one. BigQuery data warehouse ingesting raw event data from Firebase Analytics. This enabled the A/B testing, content optimization, and engagement analysis that drove product decisions. Data-driven content creation is rare in edtech — we treated it as a core advantage.

At peak, 4 engineers served 1 million monthly active users. That ratio wasn't accidental. It came from being a content-heavy, logic-light product. The app was primarily a delivery mechanism for rich media. Smart cloud choices eliminated most ops work. Firestore caching reduced backend load dramatically. And product discipline meant not building features that would increase engineering complexity without proportional value.

Mann Ki Baat

In August 2020, Prime Minister Modi spoke about Kutuki on Mann Ki Baat — a radio address that reaches hundreds of millions.

We added as many users in a single day as the entire previous 18 months combined.

Before this, growth had been organic: word of mouth, strong content, parents telling other parents. The Mann Ki Baat moment changed the trajectory.

The seed round

The visibility and traction post-Mann Ki Baat triggered our seed round — $2.2 million led by Omidyar Network, with Akatsuki (a Japanese entertainment company) and our existing angel investors.

Partnerships

The deepest partnership was with Google. We powered the phonics and language content on Google Read Along — that drove close to 100 million book reads of Kutuki content. Apple featured us as a top education app. Jio gave us distribution across their massive user base.

All of these came from the strength of original, quality content — not marketing spend. When you have 1,500 pieces of original content across 10 languages with strong engagement metrics, the partnerships come to you.

The hard parts

The Indian market adds its own challenges. Device fragmentation across low-end Androids. 2G and 3G networks still prevalent in many areas. Price sensitivity around paid education apps. And the fact that supporting 10 languages isn't 10x the work — it's 10 different cultural contexts, scripts, and content strategies.

Competition from free content is constant. YouTube is free and has unlimited nursery rhymes. We had to justify why curated, pedagogical content was worth paying for. The live learning pivot during COVID was both a revenue necessity and a significant product complexity increase — managing teachers, scheduling, and video infrastructure on top of a content app.

What I learned

The biggest one: localization isn't translation. You can't take an English nursery rhyme, swap the words into Kannada, and expect it to land. Each language needs its own content — stories, songs, characters that feel native. We had to learn that the hard way a few times.

Retention matters more than acquisition. Our 95% month-1 retention came from adaptive difficulty and parent engagement loops — not growth hacks. You can't hand-craft 1,500 stories across 10 languages without production pipelines, so we built those early. Enterprise partnerships work completely differently from consumer growth. And if you're building edtech in India, plan for offline-first — 60% of our users had intermittent connectivity.

Where Kutuki is now

Kutuki is still operating. AI-powered customer experience handles interactions. The YouTube presence continues to grow. The content library — those 1,500 stories and 500 games across 10 languages — continues to serve kids and families across India.

I've stepped back from day-to-day operations and moved into AI building and fractional product work. But six years of building Kutuki shaped how I think about everything — product, content, scale, language, India. It comes up in basically everything I do now.

The problem we started with hasn't gone away. There are still 200 million early learners in India who need content that looks and sounds like their world. The content we built is still doing that work.